


Moscow to the End of the Line

by True_Believer



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Road trip for Bucky to find himself (sort of), Road trip to find Bucky (sort of), Trans-Siberian Railway, humor?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-30
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-06 20:26:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1871301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/True_Believer/pseuds/True_Believer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The memories he would find in Russia would not be good, obviously, but they were still his, and he never could abide having things stolen from him. Deciding exactly where to go within Russia might be a little trickier. If he wanted to efficiently spark his memories, he would have to make his way across practically all of Russia. Fortunately for him, there happened to be a railroad designed for that very purpose.</p><p>He took another swig of his vodka and grimaced. It was going to be a long trip."</p><p>Or, the obligatory Trans-Siberian Railway fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Moscow

**Author's Note:**

> MASSIVE DISCLAIMER: My knowledge of Russia is extremely limited, and my knowledge of the Trans-Siberian Railway is even more so. You have my sincerest apologies for the errors that I am bound to make in this story; I mean no offense. If you’re Russian (and even if you're not) and notice mistakes, please let me know, because I do want to learn!

He was on a train, and he was drunk. Or he was almost drunk. Or he was trying to get drunk. One of the three, at any rate. He took another swig of vodka and then peered at the bottle dubiously. It did not seem to be working as well as he remembered, but then, considering the state of his memory, that wasn’t saying much. Especially with the way his head was hurting right now.

It wasn’t a headache, exactly. It was more like the burning itch of a wound healing, or the uncomfortable electric needling of blood returning to a limb that has fallen asleep. Except he thought a head injury like that, inside his very skull, would probably kill even him, and waking up didn’t feel like electricity, it felt like thawing, and also you can’t exactly have circulation return to an arm that’s made of metal, but maybe it didn’t matter since he was considering brains anyway, not arms, and okay, this metaphor was getting stupid. (Maybe the alcohol was working a little better than he had originally thought.)

But anyway. The pain in his head. He had experienced it several times before, he knew: usually when he had been away from the Chair too long, or when a trigger sparked a malfunct—a memory. There had been a time, he thought, when he went AWOL—something about the term in this context made him frown, but he decided not to overthink it—he went AWOL and travelled to New York, thinking somehow that being there might make him feel better. It didn’t. New York was not the way he thought it would be, and he had constantly found himself searching the crowds for a face that wasn’t there. The burning in his brain had gotten worse, and by the time his handlers arrived to collect (and penalize) him, he was so disoriented that he could barely put up a fight. He hadn’t been sure if he wanted to.

This time, the pain was the same but his mental state was different, and he was almost certain that Steve Rogers was the difference. Meeting Steve had made the memories come back as never before, and at first he had fought it, resolving to eliminate the mission as efficiently as possible and never look back. He had felt something big building up behind an electric fence in his head, and if he were to open that gate, he thought it might crush him. The Winter Soldier had been, strangely enough, afraid. But what happened on the Helicarrier had changed that, and he had let go—he was always letting go of things, wasn’t he?—and now he knew Steve was much more than a mission (though muscle memory and every iota of his programming might say otherwise).

He was remembering fragments of himself at a violent rate, and his brain burned as badly as ever, but the thought of Steve contained the fire, gave it purpose, made it warm and illuminating rather than blinding and destructive. Like a fireplace. Yeah. A red, white, and blue fireplace, with yellow hair and a punk attitude. (He hiccoughed a little, and abruptly decided to quit that line of thought. At this moment in time, he decided, he was in no condition to be attempting metaphors. In fact, his fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Ciesinski, would probably argue that he was never in any condition to be attempting metaphors. Funny, he hadn’t thought of her in ages.) Anyway, he had left the Potomac with the singular purpose of getting closer to the _idea_ of Steve without actually getting closer to Steve—of warming himself by the fireplace without, uh, putting the fireplace in danger of his violent and volatile self. (Stupid metaphors.)

He had always been a natural at seeming American; it was one of the things that had made him most valuable as an Asset. After all, being an assassin required more than just waiting on rooftops and taking the shots. It required _getting_ to those rooftops, and getting comfortable in the target’s environment, and then walking away from the chaos as if he hadn’t been the one to cause it. (The last mission – if he thought hard about it, the last _few_ missions – they had been exceptions. Usually he was an assassin, but for those missions he was only a weapon.) Even if his handlers had sometimes furrowed their brows at his slang for sounding a little dated—(“ _And whose fault is that?”_ asked a snarky voice in his head that he thought might sound like Bucky used to)—his essential mannerisms remained undeniably American despite the passing of time. They had even had him try to teach this American-ness to other assets, sometimes. (“ _Like this?”_ asked the little Russian girl sitting across from him, who was quite a bit older than she looked, right before blowing an enormous bubble of bright pink Dubble Bubble gum. He grinned his trademark American half-smile at her—“ _Not half bad, Red”—_ and leaned forward to pop it with a metal finger and—oh. Nobody there.He wondered if there were still drugs in his system for the vodka to interact with. He knew he had a lot of problems, but usually hallucinations weren’t one of them.)

Anyway. Apparently he was at natural at acting American because he had been, at one point, a natural-born American. So it wasn’t so hard for him to saunter into the Smithsonian without arousing unwanted attention, and it wasn’t so hard for him to blend in with the other tourists (as long as he didn’t flinch too strongly when a particularly vivid shock of memory was accompanied by an equally vivid shock of pain in his skull). Still, HYDRA knew very well what he looked like, and apparently they also knew enough about James Buchanan Barnes to predict what he might do next. So he was not excessively surprised to be attacked a few blocks away from the Smithsonian by a sparse team of Hydra agents dressed, rather predictably, as policemen.

It had not gone well for anyone involved.

He had left the encounter with his right shoulder dislocated ( _again_ ), a few cracked ribs, and a nasty, blood-bordered rip in his jacket that almost convinced him to limp back to the Smithsonian to procure a Captain America hoodie from a gift shop. Almost. (“ _You should see the other guy,”_ huffs the punk in his head, the solidness of his too-deep voice belying the bruises on the too-thin face.)The other guys, in this case, hadn’t left the encounter at all, so he still counted it as a win. But despite how fragmented Hydra was at the moment, he was fully expecting two more heads to take their place. Monsters never really die, after all. (He would know.)

He had been remembering a lot of things over the last several days. Some memories were triggered by texts online, or photos in library books, or keepsakes in museum exhibits. Others seemed to have popped into his head for no reason at all. But what he remembered most of all—what he had been remembering ever since he realized that _he knew the man on the bridge_ —was that Steve was his responsibility to protect. The longer he lingered in D.C., close to Steve, the greater the chance that Hydra would destroy them both. So he had to go away—somewhere as far from Steve as possible, but ideally, someplace he had been before. Someplace that would keep prompting his mind to remember things. Because as much as it hurt, both physically and in other ways, he wasn’t willing to stop remembering things. He wouldn’t stop until he got it all back, or died—whichever came first. (So probably until he died.)

He could conceivably go to New York, but then he had dismissed that option almost out of hand. It would be too close, too predictable, too easy. Better to get out of America entirely. Which shouldn’t be a problem, because his owners had not _always_ been based in the United States. There had been a shift at some point, he was sure. They used to tell him he was fighting for Mother Russia, not that he was saving the world. So if Russia was where the Winter Soldier had started, Russia was where he would go. And if he could draw Hydra away from Steve at the same time, so much the better.

The memories he would find in Russia would not be good, obviously, but they were still _his_ , and he never could abide having things stolen from him. And getting to Russia from the States wouldn’t be too hard for him; he had his ways of getting a hold of money and documentation, and he was almost as good at seeming Russian as he was as seeming American. Deciding exactly where to go within Russia might be a little trickier. It was, after all, a massive country, and he’d had plenty of time over the decades to travel between sites (or be transferred between storage units, as the case may have been if he’d been frozen at the time). If he wanted to efficiently spark these memories, he would have to make his way across practically all of Russia. Fortunately for him, there happened to be a railroad designed for that very purpose.

He took another swig of his vodka and grimaced. It was going to be a long trip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title shamelessly stolen -- I mean, borrowed -- from Venedikt Erofeev’s book of the same name. True story, I hated the book. But I do enjoy referencing it. For instance, Bucky’s bubble gum moment was an allusion to the many hallucinations experienced by the book’s protagonist. Also, the vodka and general drunkenness was an allusion to, um, the entirety of the book.
> 
> Incidentally, you aren’t actually allowed to bring alcohol onto Russian trains. But I’m not so sure that would stop Bucky if he really wanted to.


	2. Vladimir

Sam had been told, by multiple guidebooks and several well-meaning friends, that when travelling, it is best to speak the language as much as possible to avoid looking like a tourist. Unfortunately for Sam, in several of the countries he happened to travel to, his foreignness was betrayed (or at least strongly suggested) by the color of his skin before he could even say a word. He wondered if this might be part of why, despite Steve’s fluent Russian, the man collecting tickets was taking such vigorous interest in asking about the details of their trip and showing absolutely no interest in actually letting them board the train. That, and maybe the fact that Steve was as American as apple pie, even if he wasn’t wearing his Captain America outfit. It wasn’t just his physical appearance or his clothing, but also the way he moved and carried himself, and most of the people they had interacted with so far had immediately identified them both as foreigners. For the most part, people had been pretty friendly toward them anyway. But the ticket-collector looked almost gleeful, and Sam wasn’t sure he liked the mischievous look in his eye.

Sam was still frowning at this thought when a tinny (yet oddly deep) voice suddenly started crooning, “ _[We’re no strangers to love. You know the rules, and so do I!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)” _ He quickly checked his pockets, but no, apparently it was actually the ticket-collector’s phone. _Huh_ , thought Sam in quiet surprise as the ticket-collector held up a “one moment, please” finger and turned away from Steve to talk on the phone. Then, noticing the perceptive and slightly questioning look Steve was giving him, he deftly executed a pre-emptive subject change. “So what’s the guy saying?”

Steve, successfully derailed from asking about Sam’s ringtone, shrugged helplessly. “He just keeps asking about us, and why we’re travelling, and what the weather is like in D.C. around this time of year, and whether I think Madonna is getting old … Honestly at this point, I think his questions have more to do with his curiosity than anything else. Our passports are fine, and we should have covered everything related to security in the first five minutes.” They had been talking for almost fifteen, and the train was supposed to leave any minute.

“And what did you tell him?” asked Sam, brow furrowing slightly. He hoped Steve hadn’t tried to lie. If he had, it would be no wonder that the ticket-collector thought they seemed a little fishy. Sam wasn’t sure, but he somehow doubted that lying was within Captain America’s skill set.

“I told him we’re travelling to meet up with a friend who has spent some years living in Russia. The weather in D.C. is fine—pretty nice right now, actually. And I don’t have much of an opinion on Madonna; she’s on my list, but I haven’t gotten around to listening to her music yet.”

Sam raised an eyebrow, and with tongue firmly in cheek, said, “Oh, so you didn’t tell him about your daring hospital-break? Or how your best friend from the 1940s was brainwashed into being an ex-Soviet slash Hydra assassin, and that you’ve made it your mission to find him and restore his memories? Or how your _other_ ex-Soviet assassin friend gave you his file and has been dropping you hints of extra intel and the occasional Russian visa every few days? Or how instead of reporting back to Congress on the mess you left when you—okay, _we—_ destroyed SHIELD _,_ you decided to drop off the radar and fly to Russia because your friend _might_ have been spotted with a ticket to Moscow at Dulles International, and _might_ also have bought some tickets for the Trans-Siberian Railway on a library computer? And as for weather, you didn’t tell him that the blue skies over D.C. have lately been dimmed by burnt-Helicarrier smoke?” He paused for a second. “I got nothing on Madonna. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about her either.”

The look Steve gave him would have caused anyone who didn’t know him better to quail, and given the most dedicated of Nazis second thoughts. (Come to think of it, it probably had.) On Sam, though, it just had the effect of softening his smile a little. He knew Steve was going through a rough time—maybe the roughest time of his life, which was saying something. He also knew (better than most) that emotional pain is real and valid and _human_ , and part of being a friend is sharing in that pain, even if it is not strictly yours to carry. Sam had made it clear to Steve that he would stick with him in the search for Bucky, and though he would _not_ let Steve let go of hope, he _would_ join with him in mourning for what had already been lost, too. (The search for _Bucky_. Sam wasn’t sure if any trace of the real Bucky Barnes had actually survived Hydra’s torments, but calling the man “The Winter Soldier” was like driving a knife into Steve’s soul, so Bucky it was.)

Still, Steve had a dangerous tendency to dwell in his grief—to build a house in it and live there, rather than walking through it to higher ground. Without a little comic relief, Sam thought he might turn into a red, white, and blue grief machine, so he had long decided not to hesitate with his occasional half-attempts at humor. He put a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Hey man, I know you obviously wouldn’t be spilling all our secrets. The history books say you’re a master strategist, so I give you that much credit at least. What I’m trying to figure out is why the ticket-collector still won’t let us on the train.”

“I think…” started Steve slowly, doubt edging his voice. “I think he’s… trolling us?”

“You know that word?” asked Sam, feeling a little more delighted than maybe he should, under the circumstances.

“Yeah. Tony taught it to me when he was explaining what it means to be… Rick-Rolled? I think that’s the term he used. Catchy song, anyway.”

“Uh. Yeah.” Time to steer the conversation away from his mildly embarrassing ringtone again. This time, though, Sam didn’t have to—there was a loud noise, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw the ticket-collector waving cheerfully at them through a window as the train pulled out of the station. “Hey! Wait!” Sam yelled, not caring that he was using English. “Let us on! We have boarding passes!” He waved his arms wildly (and impotently), as if it would help. “Come on! We are literally on the platform with our tickets!”

Steve just stared at the departing train, jaw hanging slightly, eyebrows furrowed in the same devastated look of confused concern that he’d had when he first stumbled upon _Jersey Shore_ while recuperating in the hospital. (Sam had gotten to be in charge of the TV remote after that.) Then abruptly, his expression changed: his eyes widened, his jaw dropped further, and he looked like he was about to start yelling, too. But the moment passed, along with the train, and he turned to Sam with his jaw clenched. “Sam. Bucky was on that train.”

This was more than enough to bring Sam’s outraged flailing to an abrupt standstill. He looked at Steve seriously. “You saw him?”

Steve nodded tightly. “Just now, as the train went by.”

Sam swore. “Okay. Okay, here’s what we’ll do. You—you’re gonna sit down for a little bit—” (mainly because the color had drained out of Steve’s face, and he looked like he might fall over any second) “—and I am going to go and figure out the next train to…” He consults the unused ticket in his hand to figure out the next stop. “Vladimir. And we’ll do our best to catch up with Bucky there. Okay?” Steve nodded again without meeting his eyes. Sam felt a pang; Steve was a young guy, but at moments like these it seemed like all ninety-some years of his life showed on his face. And though Steve generally seemed to be utterly confident that he would get Bucky back, there were times when the hauntedness in his eyes overcame the bravado.

It took Sam a little while, since his mastery of the Russian language was basically nonexistent, but eventually he was able to figure out their options. He went to the bench outside the station where he had left Steve and reported back. “Okay,” he said, “so we could of course try for this train again, but not today. We’d have to wait till tomorrow. And there’s an express train that might even be faster than this one. But I think we’d have to go to another station to catch it, and by the time we’d get there, we’d miss that one too. So either way, our train won’t get to Vladimir until tomorrow. _However_ , maybe Bucky will have already gotten off at that stop. Or maybe someone in Vladimir will be able to tell us where he’s going next. We’ve still got a chance, Steve.”

Steve ran a hand over his face before looking up. “It’s just. I can’t believe I lost him _again_. I said I’d be there for him, till the end of the line, and—” Steve took a steadying breath and shook his head, swallowing whatever words he would have said next. Sam didn’t say anything for a few moments. (What was there to say that could make any of this remotely okay?) He looked around helplessly, and then did a double-take. His eyes settled on a black convertible sitting in the parking lot in front of them, and a slow smile spread onto his face.

“Hey Steve. Remember that road trip we talked about going on?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise I’m not picking on Sam for being black (or accusing Russians of being racist, for that matter). But as a black person myself, I have often experienced the Instant Foreigner Phenomenon described at the beginning of this chapter. Nonetheless, I do still firmly believe in at least trying to speak the language when traveling, if only to show that country the respect it deserves!
> 
> The train fiasco that happened to Steve and Sam in this chapter actually happened to people I know last March in Moscow. They ended up flying to their destination, but I say, why fly when you can road trip?!
> 
> (I never actually say that. Except when it comes to fanfiction, I guess.)


	3. Nizhny Novgorod

He was no longer attempting drunkenness. The close call in the dining car between Vladimir and Nizhny Novgorod had been a sufficient wake-up call, and he had immediately resolved to get off at the next stop to avoid an encounter with Hydra while on the train (the idea of which, for some reason, made him shudder despite himself). Even with his alcohol-clouded senses, he had noticed the Hydra team before they spotted him, and was able to make a clean getaway (sans dinner, unfortunately). Not that he couldn’t have defended himself, but he’d rather deal with Hydra somewhere that _wasn’t_ an enclosed space packed with civilians.

(The Winter Soldier would not have cared so much. He did. He could add this to his list of “Ways I Am Different from the Winter Soldier,” in hopes that it would eventually become longer than his list of “Ways I Am Different from James ‘Bucky’ Barnes.”)

So he adjusted his plans a little and decided to lie low for a little bit before boarding the train again. Maybe he’d even stumble upon some memory triggers while at this stop. He wasn’t particularly expecting to, since he couldn’t remember ever coming here before, but that didn’t mean much.

As he slipped through the back alleys of Nizhny Novgorod, trying to figure out his next steps, he had also decided that he should probably not be drinking so much. It took a lot of alcohol to get past his killer metabolism, so it wasn’t a very efficient process. (The Winter Soldier had been all about efficiency, and old habits die hard.) Plus, it wasn’t really helping with his head, or making him feel any better about his nightmarish memories of things he had done as the Winter Soldier, which had been most of the point. Worse, it was making him less aware of enemies (namely, Hydra).

And he really didn’t want to fall back into their hands. Because if he let them take him again, he would end up endangering ( _killing_ ) more people. (And because selfishly, if he was going to be honest with himself, he didn’t want to die. Which was stupid, since he didn’t even know who he was at this point, and also a man of his age should be content to die, but whatever. Apparently, according to his emerging memories, it had historically been characteristic of him to “ _take all the stupid with him_ ”anyway.)

So here he was in a dingy motel room in Nizhny Novgorod, sitting in the half-darkness in front of the TV and flipping channels robotically. He wasn’t watching television to entertain himself so much as to distract himself from the roaring of his own thoughts. Eventually he paused on some sort of musical comedy. He thought he remembered catching a glimpse of this before, but in black and white, like some of his dreams. There was a blonde woman singing joyously and playing the accordion, and old men playing flutes with their noses, and toward the end of the song, the performers paired off into couples and danced around on a boat.

He didn’t quite know how he went from sitting hunched on his bed to standing in the middle of the room, with his arms held out in midair—right arm gently curved to rest in front of him, left arm reaching out to the side—delicately, as if it were not a weapon. The boisterous voices from the television faded into a blur at the back of his mind, and he could almost believe that he was miles and years away from this drab motel room.

( _“Hey Sarge! Are we goin’ dancing?”_ )

“Yes we are,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.

In the end, he wasn’t sure how much time he spent with his eyes closed and his arms up, moving his body from side to side with a surprising gentleness that most would have thought the Winter Soldier incapable of expressing. Even as the Winter Soldier, he had always been graceful: he had moved and fought and killed as artistically as a ballet dancer. He supposed that he had retained the ability to dance too, even as the Winter Soldier—after all, his training and muscle memory were not eliminated with the wipes. There had never been a need, though. The closest he had come was probably sparring with Natalia as part of her training, but though those sparring matches had been many things—passionate, beautiful, desperate—they had never been gentle. He had rarely been gentle as the Winter Soldier. It was hard to remember if Bucky Barnes had been a gentle person, with so much wartime violence to sift through in his mind. But he thought that there had probably been moments—pressing a kiss to his little sister’s forehead, or holding a cold towel to a smaller Steve’s black eye, or rocking a beautiful dame in his arms on the dance floor. He squeezed his eyes shut even tighter and tried to hold onto these moments. They hurt his head just as much as any other memories would, but at least they were a reprieve from the red in his ledger.

When the burning in his brain became unbearable, he switched off the TV, double checked the locks on the door and window, and tried to go to bed. (But the music played on in his head.) 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The musical comedy Bucky watches is called Volga-Volga. They say it was Stalin’s favorite film, but don’t hold that against it—I think it’s quality entertainment! It came out in 1938, so it was originally in black and white, but they released a colorized version in 2010. It’s a famous enough film that I wouldn’t be shocked if Bucky caught glimpses of it during his time as the Winter Soldier.
> 
> By the way, happy birthday, Captain America! Also, happy birthday, America!


End file.
